Count off: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . .

August 30, 2001|By Don Wycliff. Don Wycliff is the Tri-bune's public editor.

In the unlikely event you ever meet one, don't trust a journalist who tells you he has no pet peeves. Peevishness virtually defines our breed. It's the pebble in the shoe, the burr under the saddle that makes us habitually uneasy, impatient, demanding, determined to get at The Truth.

A reader from Chicago, Randy Martens, also has his peeves, and one of them involves us in the news business. He writes to me periodically, always on a high-quality note card, and his message is always the same.

"Don," he wrote a couple of months ago, "Something is out of control in Chicago and it should be stopped."

And what is this menace, this plague?

It is crowd estimates.

That's right. Crowd estimates. As in:

- "In a sign that Chicago's gay community is coming of age politically and as a coveted consumer, an estimated record crowd of 375,000 turned out Sunday to watch the 32nd annual Gay Pride Parade." (Page 1, Metro, June 25.)

- "About 1.95 million people attended the air and water show [43rd Chicago Air & Water Show] over the weekend, down somewhat from last year's 2.2 million, mostly because of the weather, said Cindy Gatziolis of the Mayor's Office of Special Events." (Page 1, Metro, Aug. 20)

As Martens pointed out in a letter back in June, "If one assumes the [Gay Pride Parade] route was 2 miles long (10,560 feet), which it probably wasn't, there would have to have been people 18 rows deep on each side of the street for the entire length of the parade for every foot of the parade."

He is too generous. I see very few adults nowadays who are only a foot wide, whether you measure at the shoulders or the hips. Using a more realistic standard of 18 inches wide per body, the Gay Pride Parade crowd would have to have been 26 people deep on both sides of the street. It was not.

Neither was the Bud Billiken Parade crowd 38 people (generous standard) or 57 people (realistic standard) deep on both sides of the street.

And with all due respect to Gatziolis on her claim that 1.95 million people came out on that chilly, gloomy weekend for the air and water show . . . well, I'm from Missouri.

This is not the first time the issue of inflated crowd estimates has come up at the Tribune. Long-time staff members tell a story of a veteran reporter who went to extraordinary lengths to prove that official estimates of the crowds in Grant Park during Pope John Paul II's visit were exaggerated.

The only guidance that the Tribune stylebook offers is to "Give the source or sources for crowd estimates."

But as Randy Martens points out, "the figures are often given by police who don't care or [event] organizers who love the power of inflated numbers."

He adds: "It would not be so bad if newspapers didn't use the counts as gospel but they seem to have no desire in an accurate story any longer."

I think that overstates the case substantially. But he does offer a challenge. In many contexts it may be entirely appropriate to tell the reader implicitly, "Consider the source."

But at some level an exaggeration becomes so blatant and outrageous that it is incumbent on a journalist to say, peevishly, that it is just that--exaggeration.

- - -

Here's the full text of an e-mail that came in last week:

"Last month I relocated from Southern California to Illinois (job-related). I have been an LA Times reader for over 30 years. The LA Times, while not the NY Times, is good print media. I assumed the Chicago Tribune would match the quality of other dailies in major metropolitan areas. Much to my surprise, I found the Trib. to be akin to the San Diego Union Tribune, or the Santa Barbara News Press. Why is it that, although owned by the same corp. as the LA Times, the Trib. is so "small-town" in format and quality? Chicago is, after all, a major U.S. city."

Chicago also is a polite city, where people do not commonly open conversations with strangers by asking questions like: When did you stop beating your wife? Which of your children do you love the most? Would you like to see my MENSA membership card?